The Quirk Classics Blog
Notes, musings and other thoughts on the Classics.
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Robots Caused the Oil Spill Blogsplosion Winners Announced! If You Like Android Karenina... My Robot Buddy Android Karenina Glossary of Terms: A Reader's Companion Android Karenina Chaplet Android Karenina Blogsplosion Tolstoy To Do List Android Karenina: What Would Tolstoy Think? Russia vs. Robots: Independent Research for Writing Android KareninaArchives
September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009Robots Caused the Oil Spill
posted June 21st, 2010 by tiffany
After spending the last year obsessing over super-intelligent evil robots, I feel qualified to make the shocking but indisputable revelation: The BP oil spill was caused by super-intelligent evil robots.
When you think about it, it’s actually really obvious.
Point #1: Robots hate mankind
If there’s one thing the last two centuries of science fiction has taught us, it’s that robots, no matter how innocuous or chummy they seem, ultimately desire our destruction.
HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey is the most famous example, but everything from I, Robot to Battlestar Gallactica confirms that man-made creations have little on their mechanical minds other than subjugating and/or eliminating mankind. I’m sure if the Jetsons had stayed on another couple seasons, Rosie the Maid would have smothered George in his bed with a pillow.
Point #2: Robots were on the scene
Anyone who keeps up with technological developments relating to oil-platform operations knows damn well that the field has long been trending towards increased automation. Land-based engineers communicate remotely with robots working below the ocean’s surface, leading to greater efficiency...and increased potential for robotic sabotage.
Just imagine the conversation that took place that fateful day: “YOU LOOK TIRED, SIR,” the nefarious man-machine intones, gleaming end-effectors reaching for the blowout preventer. “I’LL TAKE IT FROM HERE...”
Point #3: The robots are primed to save the day
The government was asleep at the regulatory switch, and everyone from the President downwards has been roundly chastised for a slow and ineffective response. BP points fingers, drags its feet on compensation, and makes embarrassing apologies.
So who’re the only players who emerge looking not only blameless, but heroic? The robots, that’s who!
In the immediate aftermath of the leak, underwater robots were dispatched in a last-minute effort to activate the blowout preventer! Underwater robots repaired the leak on the blind shear ram and added necessary pressure! The news is laden with tales of bungling humans and courageous, selfless robots, plunging in where people with their puny lungs can’t go, braving the toxic effluvia, grappling with their mighty metal arms to shut off the leak.
So far these efforts have proved unsuccessful, but that’s just the robot masterminds building tension. When at last the valve is shut off, and the oil stops gushing, and the pelicans are clean and can fly free again, I guarantee you we will have a robot to thank for it.
So what happens next?
My prediction is that an underwater robot, probably the 1KA_Seaglider, will humbly accept the Democratic nomination for congress in the Louisiana 7th, routing Republican Charles Boustany in the fall. Using sophisticated algorithms to deduce his constituents’ precise positions on immigration and economic recovery, the Seaglider then emerges as a national figure and runs for the White House in 2012, tapping the Roombato fill out the ticket.
What you can do
Not much, frankly. Research has shown that once a plot like this gets in motion, it’s pretty much just a matter of enjoying life as much as possible before our new overlords wheel out the death rays. So enjoy life while you still can! See a movie! Go to the beach!
Well, maybe not the beach.
Blogsplosion Winners Announced!
posted June 17th, 2010 by tiffany
Blogsplosion Winners announced for Android Karenina!
If you see your username below, expect an email from us today, and we'll tell you more and ask where we can send your prizes.
Thanks to everyone who participated and made this another super-fun event of blog-tacular proportions!
Ceemonster
akosikulot
Phren
DarthMama
Themystic
HarlequinTwilight
Syntaniel
Jamiesonwolf
GeekygurlUK
Hilary
Cheig
Emial75
MonyMony
Jamiekeane
Tinman
Cinnamon
Dr what
EshadowP
RGMS
Camilla Brokking
Angelnetinc
Darlyn
Raen5171
QM
Elise
If You Like Android Karenina...
posted June 16th, 2010 by tiffany
- post by Ben H. Winters
...and I hope you do, you might want to check out some of this other stuff, all of which was influential in one way or another as I was writing it.
I, Robot (by Isaac Asimov). You can’t write about robots without owing something to Asimov, and I sure do; the Iron Laws of Robotics that govern the behavior of Android Karenina’s ‘bots are an unapologetic homage to the Master. Besides, both Tolstoy and Asimov (besides both being native Russians) were both fiction writers who cared about big ideas, and nowI’ve got Tolstoy’s characters discussing Asimov’s ideas, a bit of time-space warping I like to think Asimov would have dug.
The Stepford Wives (by Ira Levin) So very creepy and so very fun, and also a great reminder that even someone who looks and acts like a person can turn out to be robots with deadly intentions. Except none of the robots in Android Karenina look and act like people. Right?
Battlestar Gallactica (the newer one, created by David Eick and Ronald Moore) A good lesson in how quasi-futuristic people, enacting action-adventure high-tech plots, can remain compelling human characters. Plus, of course, those human-looking-but-secretly-robotic Cylons ain’t nothin’ but super-fancy Stepford wives.
Excession (by Iain Banks). A massively fun intergalactic mystery story; plus, the way the characters in Banks’ far-flung-future society commune with their super-sentient outfits, airships, and other mechanized pals informed the relationships in Android Karenina between Class III robots and their owners.
Alien (dir. Ridley Scott). Suffice it to say I took this movie’s extremely famous and shocking death scene and recast it in a decrepit provincial Russian hotel. And you thought dying of tuberculosis was bad.
The novelization of Star Wars (credited to George Lucas but really by Alan Dean Foster) Rediscovering Star Wars by reading “the book of the movie” helped me understand that Android Karenina was going to be less “hard sci-fi” (emphasis on the complexities of the technologies) and more of a “space opera” (epic scale, focus on characters and drama).
The Difference Engine (by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling) The prototypical steampunk novel (if I’m wrong on that, steampunks, drop me a telegraph). It’s the 1850s, and England has the super-computer. Engrossing action/adventure alternate history, with historical personages interacting with entirely fictional ones.
The Watchmen (by Alan Moore) Among the many reasons this graphic novel is so shatteringly good is Moore’s mastery of writing alternate history: How one significant change from reality then plays out in hundreds of small ways.
From the Earth to the Moon (by Jules Verne). I borrowed most from Verne’s delightful pre-space age vision of how man could get to the moon (think giant cannonball, shot from giant cannon), but the first chapter alone is worth the price of admission. It’s a little satirical masterpiece set in The Gun Club, where al the members are missing at least one limb.
And finally, obviously…
Anna Karenina (by Leo Tolstoy and not Ben H. Winters). Similar to Android Karenina in many ways, except minus the Groznium mines, the beloved-companion robots, the slavering lizard-aliens, the lunar colonies, and, well, a lot of other stuff.
My Robot Buddy
posted June 11th, 2010 by tiffany
As one of the editors who had the delight of reading Ben H. Winters’s sci-fi Tolstoy mashup, Android Karenina, before it went to press, I was particularly smitten by the new “Class III robot” characters who found their way into the book. Each of the familiar heroes of the original novel is now paired with a whirring, thrumming, groznium-alloyed best buddy: Anna’s graceful companion, Android Karenina; Oblonsky’s cheerful little valet, Small Stiva; Count Vronsky’s valiant wolf-machine, Lupo.
It often seems as though the default vision of intelligent robots in popular culture is angry, dangerous, rebellious: Terminators, Cylons, HAL 9000, every third videogame ever produced. And yet some of the most enduring individual mechanoid characters are those who aren’t menacing at all, but fill the role of devoted friend. R2-D2 and C-3PO are the most iconic, of course, but they’re by no means alone; the charming Class III robots of Android Karenina are the heirs to a long heritage of machine-built sidekicks.
The archetypal robot pal comes, twice over, from the author who gave us the archetypal take on robotics as a whole, Isaac Asimov. In 1940, Asimov’s short story “Robbie” starred a big, clunky, mute but sympathetic metal babysitter who plays hide-and-seek with his young charge, gamely lets her win, and, later, saves her life. This set the stage for pretty much every kid-with-a-big-nonhuman-friend story that has followed (Lost in Space and The Iron Giant come to mind).
Thirteen years later, when Asimov started writing full-length novels about robots, he returned to the unlikely-best-friend scenario—this time mixing his science-fictional premise with the classic buddy-cop formula. The Caves of Steel, a murder mystery set in a futuristic, all-underground New York City, pairs cynical police detective Elijah Baley with the unfailingly polite R. Daneel Olivaw. The “R,” naturally, stands for “Robot.” At the book’s beginning, Baley is outraged at the thought of being partnered with a mechanical policeman—particularly one he feels is incapable of doing a detective’s job properly, yet seems all too likely to take his own job away from him. But over the course of the story, the man and the machine come to respect one another’s unique intelligences, and Asimov’s depiction of their relationship provides the explicit model that Gene Roddenberry would later use to create Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Commander Data, the most prominent robot pal in pop culture during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. (Heck, for that matter, KITT from Knight Rider is basically a slapstick version of the same idea.)
What fascinates me the most about the human-robot relationship in culture is that there are two very different levels on which it can operate: that of science fiction, and that of myth. When we approach the topic of intelligent machines serving as supportive companions to humanity via the mode of real science fiction, we’re unable to escape one huge, fundamental question: if the robots are truly self-aware, truly our intellectual equals as thinking beings, then how is this not slavery? Well, it is, of course, and so this is the question that frequently leads us to the very justified fear of robots realizing that their human “friends” are really masters and launching a violent revolution, a la those aforementioned Terminators and Cylons. On the other hand, if we take the mythic approach to telling such a story, we see robot companions not as a realistic sociological situation to be addressed, but simply as the Technology Era embodiment of the imaginary-friend fantasy impulse to which every human is prone. Who doesn’t occasionally wish for a best buddy with no agenda of their own beyond the desire to keep us company and lend a hand when we need one?
Android Karenina, following in Asimov’s footsteps, manages to walk the fine line between these two perspectives. We love the robots for their loyal, preprogrammed, unwavering love of their human counterparts—and yet Winters makes it clear that there is a fundamental, society-wide schism between man and machine just under the surface of this world that transcends the story’s individual characters and relationships. Those reading Android Karenina as character drama first will cheer for the robots along with the humans and sympathize with their triumphs and tragedies; those reading it primarily as allegorical or predictive science fiction will find, just when they’re sure they know how the societal struggle will ultimately unfold . . . well, that there’s more going on than meets the eye.
Stephen H. Segal would like to assure readers that neither he nor Ben H. Winters are prototypes in a new line of literature-producing robots who are all assigned the middle initial “H” for “Humanoid.”
Android Karenina Glossary of Terms: A Reader's Companion
posted June 10th, 2010 by tiffany
- by Ben H. Winters
One thing about turning Tolstoy's classic story of love and loss into a sci-fi action/adventure epic: the vocabulary is off the charts. Between the Russian names, the sci-fi words, and the totally made-up words, Android Karenina is the kind of book where the curious reader might benefit from a bit of a glossary.
Beloved-companion: the common term for Class IIIs, the extremely advanced, custom-built robots owned by most wealthy Russians. Class IIIs are best friend and servant, offering wise counsel or quiet comfort, lifting baggage, providing personal security, and on and on. The title character of Android Karenina is beloved-companion to the beautiful Anna Karenina.
Caretaker: a human official who watches over and leads a band of robot soldiers, typically 77s.
Communiqué: a visual or written message, relayed in the torso-mounted monitor of one's beloved-companion.
the Face: the beloved-companion of Alexei Karenin, Anna's husband. It hides half of his natural face, and many secrets.
the Grav: the Moscow-St. Petersburg High Speed Massive Antigravitational Transport; similar to what we call a train, but bigger, faster, and cleaner.
groznium: “the miracle metal,” an alloy discovered beneath the Russian soil in the time of Ivan the Terrible. Groznium's various remarkable properties have allowed for the technological advancements that have so transformed Russian society.
Honored Guests: alien creatures from a distant planet who will one day come to redeem the human race—according to the true believers known as xenotheologists.
The Iron Laws: the sacred body of programming that controls the behavior of robots.
koschei: skittering, insect-like killer robots, one of the various mechanized death devices designed by UnConSciya.
Lupo: the beloved-companion robot of Count Vronsky, the dashing regimental soldier with whom Anna falls in love. Lupo, animal-shaped like all military issue beloved-companions, is a giant mechanical wolf.
Ministry: though there are other Ministries, the term invariably refers to the most powerful, The Ministry of Robotics and State Administration. Supreme power rests with those in the Higher Branches of Ministry.
Pitbots: along with Glowing Scrubblers and II/Extractor/4s, robots who work in the vast groznium mines held by landowners such as Konstantin Dmitrich Levin.
UnConSciya: a violent anarchist cabal made up of former official scientists, frustrated by government control of technological progress; short for the Union of Concerned Scientists
77s: enforcer robots, feared and loved, whose bulb-shaped heads move in a constant slow and watchful revolve. At the beginning of the novel, 77s are the most powerful and feared robot in Russia.
But that's at the beginning...
